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Ghost Cowboy is about real tales from the 19th-century American frontier, when the Old West was young. Most of the posts here are actual news items from the 1800s and early 1900s. We'll be adding "new" content every week. Travel with us and sign up for an account, and you'll be able to leave comments and post in our forums. Your trailmasters, Ken in Alabama and Dave in Virginia, don't get to saddle up and vacation out west as often as they'd like, so they started this site. Drop us a note.

Awful Fate of a Band of Mexican Soldiers.
Crushed in a Canyon by Boulders Hurled by Indians.
Torture Inflicted on a Physician Who Went to Aid the Wounded.

SAN DIEGO, May 2 — News has been received here of another rout of Mexican soldiers by the Yaqui Indians near Gayuma on the Gulf of California. The wild savages have managed to get the best of the forces heretofore sent against them,

Seven Lakota scouts and four uniformed Euro-Americans posed behind an artillery piece or Hotchkiss gun, probably in the Pine Ridge Reservation near Wounded Knee, South Dakota. Photograph taken by John C. H. Grabill, 1891. View full image

PHOENIX, Arizona, Feb. 24. -- A dispatch received here yesterday from Bisbee, near the Mexican border, states that Eduardo Lopez, a desperado wanted in Mexico for the murder an officer at Fronteras, was turned over to the Mexican authorities under extradition. The Territorial officers accompanied the Mexican officers with the prisoner to the line. The Mexicans took Lopez 300 feet upon Mexican territory, bound him to a post, and shot him dead.

Lopez had killed a score of men in Sonora and in this Territory in the last five years.

SAN FRANCISCO, July 9. -- Thomas Harper, a cowboy, was hanged at Tucson, Arizona Territory, yesterday, for the murder of John Tolliday last September. His demeanor on the scaffold was cool and jaunty. He made no confession, but left letters to Curly Bill, a well-known desperado, admonishing him to take warning from him and not be too handy with his pistol, and to "Stand a heap from a man before you kill him."